Have you ever woken up to a content creator you follow on your platform of choice (especially YouTube) dropping a video about them quitting, and you click on it to discover a fifteen minute depression expedition about how burnt out they are and how they feel like YouTube was never something they wanted to do for a living or was but they didn’t know it would feel like this, or something of that nature?
I know I have.
It seems to come up a lot. Another thing that comes up a lot is gaming companies constantly getting bad public rep from reports of developers getting absolutely run into the ground by corporate deadlines and the expectations of the world grinding against their work every second they spend on something. And yet another thing that comes up a lot is film writers seemingly being roped into writing fluff that has a clear agenda the network wants to send without proper heart and nuance said writers would likely rather put into their work.
Creative industries appear to be an absolute dumpster fire to work in, and one might think to themselves why anyone would even bother attempting to pursue it anymore. Well, my dear reader, it is right there in the name. You might feel it as well. Creative. When someone feels that creative spark inside of them, it goes directly against their nature to not find a way to build the kindling needed to make that spark a glowing fire the whole world has a chance to see.
Pursuing that by entering the “industry”, a relative term from what I understand to mean the working world of a particular trade, provides one the ability to make growing that fire a living, something that can pay the bills or provide for a family, all while being able to entirely focus on their creative aspiration. It seems great. Except it usually isn’t.
Allow me to introduce crunch culture. Tight deadlines and large content expectations. The true understanding of what it feels like can’t really be understood until it is personally experienced. And honestly, I still haven’t really gotten that chance the way others have. But I’ve seen it on people. It decimates their mental health and makes them think there has to be a way to change their lives so it is more bearable. It would seem that when you grow that spark into a fire too quickly, it has a chance to burn you.
It is in my humble opinion that creativity is not something that should be forced. It is something that should be exercised and definitely be used as a career path for those that choose it, but I do not believe it to be a healthy experience to try to pry as much content as possible out of someone who has talent with a particular concept. Ultimately, if you allow people to come up with ideas and executions on their own time, I believe it will be just as productive, and a lot more fulfilling, healthy and higher quality than it would be otherwise.
This is something I would love to see the world to step towards whether it is something a content creator decides to do for themselves, or how a company approaches their employees. Let us all understand that creativity is something that needs time, and it is okay to give that.
Joel Peters 